ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the role of luck in Immanuel Kant’s moral philosophy. It examines Kant’s conception of happiness, a conception that is fundamentally bound up with luck and circumstance and considers Kant’s stance on what philosophers call questions of moral luck. Kant distinguishes between hypothetical imperatives and categorical imperatives, where the former are imperatives that are set by the contingent ends that agents have, and the latter are set by ends that an agent must have, or, in Kant’s terminology, by an “objectively necessary end”. Kant’s statement regarding the unique and unconditional goodness of the good will is certainly memorable, but it is important to keep in mind its argumentative context and aim. The phenomenon Kant describes, sometimes referred to as “general injustice” acknowledges moral luck, but with a particularly Kantian twist. Kant thinks that virtue tends to bring about happiness over time, at least at the level of the moral community.
